I’m listening to two people improvise together on a piano keyboard. And I am struck, as always on such occasions, by the “conversational” aspect of it. One person introduces an idea, the other takes it and riffs on it, the first person responds with their own variation \/ counterpoint, and before you know it they are off and running.<\/p>\n
When one topic has been exhausted, they begin another, and seemingly in no time they are having an entirely different musical conversation together.<\/p>\n
Of course this sounds a lot like what happens when two people start talking to each other. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I suspect that we have within us a much deeper instinct for “conversation” than could entirely be due to our species’ relatively recent development of language.<\/p>\n
When we see two dogs or cats together, we see similar rhythms of back and forth. The ebb and flow how we spend time together — how we create<\/i> time together — is a quality of our shared experience that I suspect stems from something deep into our mammalian brains, and perhaps underlies much of our common appreciation of music, as it underlies much that we find enjoyable in life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m listening to two people improvise together on a piano keyboard. And I am struck, as always on such occasions, by the “conversational” aspect of it. One person introduces an idea, the other takes it and riffs on it, the first person responds with their own variation \/ counterpoint, and before you know it they … Continue reading “Improvisation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6042"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6042"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6045,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6042\/revisions\/6045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}